I have a subscription to Entertainment Weekly. They recently sent out an issue with a picture of Norman Reedus on the cover. Apparently there are 3 possible covers this month...but Reedus is by far the most popular. Online I am seeing people complain because the only covers being sold in their area are the other covers. I was about to throw my Reedus out. Now, I don't know whether to frame it or make a killing selling it to Europe!

The town of Grantville, Ga., has been enlivened in recent years by the zombie "walkers" of "The Walking Dead," such as this apparently female walker seen in an episode of the AMC show (Photo: AMC)

By Jeff Martin

GRANTVILLE, Ga. (AP) — When the cotton mill closed, the rural Georgia town of Grantville began a slow transformation into a ghost town.

Residents fled. Storefronts faded. Buildings decayed.

Over the decades, time turned the remains of the town into something almost post-apocalyptic, the perfect modern-day set for humans and “walkers” to attack one another. That’s how the hugely popular TV show “The Walking Dead” ended up coming to town and bringing new life to Grantville.

Several key scenes in one episode from the AMC series were filmed on and near a one-block stretch of antique buildings on Grantville’s Main Street.

The series’ fourth season premieres on Oct. 13. Crews have been filming the new episodes in Georgia, but they keep locations of future episodes closely guarded secrets until the shows air.

In Grantville, the town’s ruins were featured prominently last season. Bodies of walkers slain on the show were buried in a vacant lot beneath the brick archway remaining from a cotton mill building. Gunshots were fired from a nearby rooftop.Watch a preview of the upcoming Season Four of “The Walking Dead”:

And actor Chandler Riggs, who plays a boy on the show, entertained himself between scenes by placing pennies on the railroad tracks, the coins soon smashed into souvenirs by passing freight trains.

Now, every Saturday, visitors from around the country and the world turn off Interstate 85 and onto a two-lane highway that leads to the tiny town 49 miles southwest of Atlanta.

Since last summer, more than 3,600 visitors have taken a free tour led by Grantville Mayor Jim Sells, who explains where each scene from the “Clear” episode — during which the character Morgan makes it his mission to “clear” walkers by killing them — was filmed.

Visitors have come from as far as Australia, Singapore and Brazil, giving new life to the town through tourism, Sells said. He calls it phenomenal, but adds: “We don’t understand it.”

“Nobody came after they filmed ‘Lawless’ and ‘Broken Bridges’ here,” he said, referring to movies shot in the town. “But once this episode aired from ‘The Walking Dead,’ people started showing up from all over.” He doesn't understand that the fans of movies are completely different than the fans of TV shows, particularly dramatic shows with danger, conflict, excitement in them. No "fans" showed up here to see where scenes from Terminator 3, 3:10 to Yuma, The Lone Ranger, etc. etc. were filmed but just look how similar the Breaking Bad fan experience is to The Walking Dead. :

The cotton textile industry once fueled the economy of Grantville and the other towns in Coweta County, where a stretch of Interstate 85 is named the Alan Jackson Highway, for the country singer who grew up in nearby Newnan and wrote the 1993 hit song about the Chattahoochee River.

Grantville eventually became known by residents in the area as “the liquor exit” — it’s the only place in Coweta County to buy bottled liquor. But Sells said that “when textiles left, this town died.”

Then came the film crews.

Though Union troops destroyed train stations in many Georgia towns near the end of the Civil War, Grantville’s survived. The mayor recalled how “Walking Dead” production crews took just four hours to transform the old freight depot into a restaurant where actors battled zombies. The trains a few feet away occasionally interrupted filming, Sells said, since railroads typically don’t share train schedules with film crews.

Grantville is among a handful of rural Georgia towns undergoing a renaissance, thanks to the AMC show.

In nearby Senoia, many scenes are filmed in the historic downtown area, transforming into the fictional town of Woodbury for the show.

In Haralson, tours are offered each weekend for fans to enter the barn that was the scene of an ambush. They can hold an M16 out the same window as one “Walking Dead” actor did.

Other tours are offered in Atlanta, where a memorable scene from the show’s first season was filmed atop the roof of the old Norfolk Southern headquarters on the southern edge of downtown. Another key scene — a massive battle involving dozens of walkers and a military tank — took place in the Fairlie-Poplar Historic District.

On a recent Saturday in Grantville, visitors gathered at Station 22 Grill, as groups do every Saturday, to watch the “Clear” episode, the 12th in the show’s third season. Production crews blocked off Main Street for 15 days for filming.

Many townspeople know the dialogue by heart. A dishwasher behind the bar mouths the words: “You said that you would turn on your radio every day at dawn. … And you were not there!”

When the episode ends, more than 50 people gather around Sells. He leads them around town and then inside a second-story apartment, the hideout used by one of the characters in the show. The walls are covered with chalk-drawn rantings as they were during filming. The small-animal cages, used to hold rabbits and other bait for walkers, and a couple of rifles are there, too.

On this day, tourists from as far as New York and Indiana are in the group. Jamie Silvey, 36, of Huntsville, Ala., said she had traveled to Georgia for three Walking Dead tours. She had already taken an Atlanta tour and planned to hit Senoia the next day. And Daniel Bradley of Warner Robins, Ga., said, “Once I found out all this was here, I just wanted to get a little piece of it.”

Sells said “The Walking Dead” and other filming have revived interest and optimism for Grantville’s future. He recalled how last month, actor Jim Carrey signed autographs and posed for pictures in Grantville after filming scenes for “Dumb and Dumber To.”

That was pretty much 'classic' TWD and it didn't seem to me to be as 'settled' and 'peaceful' as the reviews made out. They are going to have to do something about the crowd of Walkers along the fences. Going out and stabbing them with poles, etc. is very inefficient and what happens to the bodies...? pretty soon they have a 'wall' of bodies stacked along the fence and the other still ambulatory walkers couldn't even get close to it. And of course there is the rotting and the smell, but they never seem to address that factor in the scripts. I was thinking of a solution, thought about digging trenches along the outside of the fence and filling them partially with oil and kerosene , then when they are full of walkers lighting it off. But that really wouldn't solve anything, they'd still have the mass pile of bodies only just charred.

Anyway, on The Talking Dead they had another Super Fan, Nathan Fillion, and the new show runner for this season, who has worked on the show in other capacities too. Nathan brought up some good points and said he's always afraid to invest too much 'emotion' into a character because they might get killed off. He thought that the 'creepy lady in the woods' last night might be worth saving if Rick could have convinced her to come back to the prison with him. But no, when he saw that she was keeping her husband or son, or someone, in a bag, just the head which was still "alive" he realized that she was too far gone and when she tried to knife him he almost shot her but then she stabbed herself, so he just walked away and left the whole sordid scene behind. Nathan was a little disappointed at that outcome.

And now they have some mystery disease to contend with. Is it the same thing that killed the pig and the guy with the glasses ? The implication is that it is the same but it killed the guy awfully quick so it probably isn't swine flu. Ebola ?.......

When the ratings beat 5 other Sunday night shows combined that's really saying something . Of course only two of those shows, Revenge and The Mentalist are worth watching in their own right....but still....

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There has been some eyebrows raised about the Daryl Dixon and Beth Greene moment. While the actress who plays her is really 28 she plays a teenager on the show. But at some point there will need to be a discussion about how the human race is going to continue. If that is the goal then the health and young will need to start reproducing. Certainly they need to figure out how to become more self reliant beyond town raids. They have started with a garden and have a sick pig but they will need to produce more in the future.

You're right about all that Rus. They never address those issues on The Talking Dead. Maybe next week when Greg Nicotero is on , someone will.

When Rick was listening to "Precious Memories" on his MP3 player in the beginning scene, that caused quite a stir in the traditional music community. We'd like to know who thought of that. Genius ! Some think that it was Carter Stanley singing, but I don't think so. It sounded like a much earlier recording from the 30's but I couldn't place the singer.

Wait a minute ! I just listened to that segment online and there is a banjo accompaniment to the tune, with a duet singing on the chorus. This opens up more possibilities. I'm sure it's from the 30's but there are more brother duets to investigate. I'll get to the bottom of this.

At least I was able to answer one guy's question on the AMC fan site. He didn't know the name of the tune.

Trying to continuously prop up that chain link fence and "thinning the herd" with spears through the fence, just isn't a long term solution. On The Talking Dead Greg Nicotero did address the problem with my idea of digging trenches and burning them. He said that the risk of forest fire was too great. That makes sense, although why a forest fire would necessarily be worse than a Zombie Apocalypse is problematic.

If it weren't for the "7500" Walkers out on the road (Nicotero's number) which can't be stopped with any sort of fence short of a 'Game of Thrones/protect the castle - style' massive wooden fence, I would have argued for them to go look for a large trench digger, a bulldozer, and a flat-bed truck to transport them, bring them back to the prison and dig a series of deep, parallel trenches outside the fences. This would be complicated and dangerous to do but if they could do it, a large number of Walkers would fall deep into the trenches, then they could bulldoze the dirt back on top of them. This is turning into a challenging engineering problem...

One of the guests was this lady whom of course I had never heard of ....

i think one reason that TWD and BB are/were so popular is that they gave fans a peak on the inside as to how scenes are created and give fans a chance for feed back with the "Talking...." shows after each episode. Here's some from the TV show....